Hammond looked at his watch. “There’s a four-fifteen flight I can make. I appreciate your trouble. And I understand your position in this: If and when you should ever need it, I can testify as to this meeting and what you gave me. But like I said, it isn’t unusual. It’s pretty typical. We get it all the time. I’ll see that these reach the right hands.”
“Here’s something else that probably ought to go to the same people. It’s just a list of all the county and state and federal permissions a person would have to get to build out there on Bernard. And I’ve put my guess as to the chance of getting them. You can see that after a lot of them I’ve put ‘no chance at all.” Being a broker, I’m pretty well up on how hard it is to get permits.”
“This ought to be useful too. Thanks. I’m glad I was able to come down and talk to you.”
His mother told everybody that Lancelot’s daddy was killed in Korea before Lancelot was born. It was easier to tell than the true story, and maybe easier for her boy to believe. But she was at last the only person left who called him Lancelot. He hated that name. He was determined to have people call him Bubba. He liked that name. He liked the warm, rough, friendly, dangerous sound of it. He called himself Bubba. He was big for his age, and he hammered a lot of kids into calling him Bubba. Bubba Davis.
Then one rainy afternoon in junior high, at a rehearsal in the auditorium, a teacher had called him Lancelot, and he had bellowed from the stage, “Ever’body calls me Bubba!”
And Chuck Tyler, one of those he had tried to beat up and couldn’t, yelled from the audience, “You ain’t no Bubba, boy. You’s a Booba!”
And, in time, he got used to being called Boob Davis, and even came to like it in a certain sense because it had become his costume. People expect a boob to be hearty and muscular and loud and witless. People appreciate a boob. A boob makes them feel smarter than they are, by comparison. They help you when they can. You laugh loudly at their jokes. You run and fetch things for people, like a happy dog. And people make allowances. They expect you to screw up. And that means you can take bigger risks, because when things don’t work out, you’re forgiven.
The offices of the Bernard Island Corporation were on the tenth floor of the West Bay Independent Bank Building, an almost new signature building on the northwest corner of Beach Boulevard and Twenty-third Street. Boob Davis was standing by the window wall in Tucker Loomis’ office, looking out toward the Gulf.
“Swear to God, Tuck, I had to look out this thing ever’ day, I’d sooner or later take a run at it. Makes me want to jump. You should maybe have a little railing outside there.”
“So come over and sit down and tell me more.”
Boob ambled over and swung a straight chair around and straddled it, resting his forearms on the chair back. “Nothing much more to tell. We’ve got the experts all lined up. Hydrologists beach erosion guys, hurricane construction specialists, desalinization figures, core samples, botanists, marine biologists, ecologists, sewage disposal people. We’ve got a rendering of the whole island the way it would have looked, all in color, like from two thousand feet up. Pretty damn thing. He put in both clubs and about sixty houses and, like you suggested, the big boat basin.”
“Table model?”
“Be ready by next weekend. It’s hinged in two places so we can get it into the courtroom. And we’ve got a nice slide show. I didn’t like the sound track. I think music was a bad idea. So it’s going to be just voice, and now the fellow from Sam’s office that’s going to read it, he’s got a dry boring voice. That’s what you should have in court so nobody thinks it’s some kind of jazz going on. Tell you the truth, I can’t think of one damn thing we’ve forgot. Not a one.”